The hunt to find a skilled beautician for her nuptials turned out to be far more painful than she’d anticipated.Then Renu Bisht was preparing to get married a couple of years ago, she came up against a problem that gives brides-in-waiting plenty of headaches.

The hunt to find a skilled beautician for her nuptials turned out to be far more painful than she’d anticipated.

The really good ones were either booked or too expensive, and experiments with cheaper professionals didn’t meet her quality requirements. It was only after several calls and help from friends and family that someone was finally located and signed up.

Bisht, a consultant who’d worked with KPMG and Wipro, decided to channel her frustrations with this search to turn entrepreneur and cofounded VanityCube, an online curated beauty services platform aimed at fixing a lopsided market for beauty services.

“India’s beauty services market has expensive, large branded players and very small players of low quality,” says Bisht.

“What is worse, if you go from one salon or parlour to the other, you’re charged varying rates for the same service.”

In addition, the beauty services business is also hobbled by polarisation of work — weekends and holidays see a flood of orders, while other times see centres (and professionals) vastly under-utilised.

“The people who run this industry — beauticians and other freelance professionals — are not organised and there’s no consistency on services they deliver,” she adds.

Since its inception, she and her cofounder Pragya Upadhyay have sought to grow Vanity-Cube rapidly, by providing services not just at home, but even in offices and corporate parks with express offerings to women at work.

Spreading VanityCube’s services will be key to growing the business — the firm services 100-150 bookings a day currently — and expects that to increase to 2,000 to 3,000 in the next 12 months.

Professionals at Service

Five months after they raised an angel round of funding to kickstart their beauty services platform StayGlad, the founders Kavish Desai, Shashank Gupta and Prateek Jain (IIT-Kharagpur classmates) netted an undisclosed amount in a series A tranche from investors; these included storied venture capital (VC) fund Bessemer Venture Partners and Anil Chopra, the former chief executive of Lakme Lever which runs a pan-India chain of salons for women.

“There is a great opportunity to disrupt the FMCG-like beauty services model by devising an asset-light premium salon experience,” says Jain.

Rather than have their target audience (women in the age group of 18-40 primarily) visit salons, these ventures want to bring professionals to their homes. While some startups aggregate freelance beauty professionals, others have their own dedicated personnel, while some go halfway — with a limited marketplace or curated list.

Unlike many other local services, where ticket sizes are as little as Rs 300, beauty service startup founders say their orders range from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500.

What’s more, since these services are typically ordered home, they want its purchase to move from a planned one (monthly waxing) to an impulse buy. “Average order value is high, stickiness strong and spends are going to increase as disposable incomes with women increase,” says Jain.

His venture may be just getting started; it executes 150-200 orders a day. StayGlad plans to now expand to two or three cities, says Jain, as it brings more beauticians on its platform.

Even in Bengaluru, its headquarters, the firm has barely made a dent — according to some industry estimates, there are some 20,000 beauty pros in the city and under 1,000 of them are on any of these platforms.

Well-funded local services providers say they can’t be discounted in this market. For example, Timesaverz has over 100 beauticians registered on its hyperlocal marketplace, while local services provider Urban-Clap sees beauty in the top 10 offerings it provides, both by value and volume of orders.

As these companies seek to focus on higher value orders and improve their profitability, beauty services (where order sizes are double or more of their current average billing) will be a major focus area.

Customers, primarily women, say that the services on offer at existing salons are spotty and booking appointments at convenient times remains a challenge. “I have no use for an appointment at 4 pm on a Wednesday, when I am at work,” says Kavita, a 25-yearold banker in Mumbai.

“The other option is an unlikely slot on Saturday evening, which means dealing with a packed salon and rushed attendants.”

Instead, she’s experimented with professionals coming home and says for someone with a 50-60 hour work week, this emerging business model offers many pluses.

“I control both the time and quality of these services and, over the last two or three months, quality and range of services have both improved,” she adds.

Field Days

The Bengaluru market may form a small slice of the opportunity in India. According to industry estimates, in the top 35 cities, there are some 85,000 salons (four-chair, two-bed units) in operation.

According to some rough estimates, there are as many as 1,80,000-2,00,000 beauty professionals across India, with 50,000-60,000 of them being freelancers.

Entrepreneurs in this market say that there is an opportunity to at least double the earnings of these freelancers and also help smaller salons streamline and upgrade their services.

While improving the lot of freelancers may sound altruistic, company executives say that this requires them to be intensively re-trained (several ventures have their own academies for this) and provided with the right products to make a mark. Done right, the business can look impressive.

On karva chauth, for example, beauticians at Vyomo, a company backed initially by the likes of cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan and TaxiForSure founder Apremeya Radhakrishna, worked from 6:30 am to 2 am the next day in the Capital, racing to meet an explosion of orders.

These orders may not come from home, alone. As the target demographic (women aged 18-40 is the sweet spot) go to work more and get more mobile, companies need to chase after them — rather than the other way around.

Bisht and Upadhyay, the founders of VanityCube, spoke to nearly 300 women consumers to understand their beauty needs before getting started. Uniformly, the need was not just for on-demand services, but to get them anywhere.

Companies like VanityCube, then, can’t remain just “home salon” providers, but need to expand to suit the changing needs of its customers — the firm has express services at the offices of Snapdeal for instance — and is pushing more B2B engagements to expand.

Plans to Branch Out

Darpan Sanghvi has almost 100 salons either operational or in various stages of construction (and has raised $10 million from Tano Capital), but thinks the really big opportunity may lie online.

His venture MyGlamm, started in July 2015, provides 300 services a day in Mumbai and Pune and now wants to expand to two or three more cities.

Sanghvi claims that his online venture will soon raise some $10 million in fresh funding and has got a host of VCs and high net worth individuals interested.

“The key to success in this business is making sure your services are spot on...this is the only way to build repeatability,” says Sanghvi.

The other aspect that is key to the success, in the business of beauty services, is cross-selling and upselling, which MyGlamm is expected to focus on strongly.

For example, new offerings such as NovaLash Eyelash Extensions, from the US, and HD Brows from the UK (high definition eyebrows) will be only available on MyGlamm.

“The idea is to take a cheaper service and transform it into a much higher value one, providing better margins for the business,” adds Sanghvi.

The company isn’t relying on its own platform to grow. Instead, it is leaning on other ecommerce ventures such as Quikr, Nykaa (a women’s fashion venture) and TrulyMadly (a dating app) to try to net a larger audience for MyGlamm’s services.

“Our goal has always been to create a brand that consumers feel confident about and relate to with credible beauty services, and build a differentiated service portfolio with exclusive services,” contends Sanghvi.

Based on this strategy, MyGlamm will leverage the distribution networks of other established ecommerce players, because their consumers identify MyGlamm as an influencer in beauty services.

Investors seem interested in backing business plans that offer something new in an industry filled with plenty of similar sounding ideas.

“We are keen to back assetlight, tech-driven models that can be standardised and scaled up rapidly,” says Vikram Gupta, chief of IvyCap, an early stage investment firm.

He believes that vanilla-listing models, for example, aren’t sticky and viable in the long term. “This is a highlyfragmented and unorganised market and is waiting for a business to disrupt it…it is an opportunity to build a billion-dollar business,” he adds.

Prettifying the Profile

Following the lead of hotel aggregators such as OYO Rooms (which saw its valuation grow 10-fold in 12 months), Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash want to build a similar offering in the beauty services business.

Their brand Purplle on the one hand acts as an intermediary between salons and consumers, but they also want to build their own label.

Rather than build its own salons, Purplle today focuses on helping single salons (or small chains), which are often passed up by consumers with quality and hygiene concerns.

“Capacity utilisation at salons and for beauty services professionals is barely 30% and the existing business model needs to be urgently recast,” Taneja says.

Purplle

offers to cobrand these salons, upskill their staff and offer higher-value products and services to boost its profile. It has cobranded 26 such salons so far and Taneja says it will overhaul 1,000 salons in Delhi and Mumbai in 2016.

The startup works on a revenue share model with these salons (it gets a fifth of receipts) and makes small investments in branding.

In 18 months, Abhinav Khare, the founder of Bengaluru-based Vyomo, claims to have created an industrystartup leading online beauty services marketplace.

While the competition takes up some 100-150 services a day, Khare claims that Vyomo has already hit 600-800, and also provides a far larger bouquet of services to consumers.

As broader horizontal home services firms such as Housejoy, LocalOye and Timesaverz edge their way into the market, he isn’t impressed.

“This isn’t the same as a blue collar job…I have people who have studied and trained in the US and UK and earn more than many MBA grads on my platform,” he says.

“Beauty services is a highly specialised field and hyperlocal startups don’t have the skills on their own to be successful in this space.”

While these horizontal local services players are keen to add higher-value services to their business (in this case beauty services), Khare says their approach lacks focus and repeatability.

Vyomo, he adds, is focused on the sweet spot of women in the age group of 18-40 and, in November 2015, it had a repeat rate of 82%.

“We are operational in five cities with some 1,500 stylists (15% of them exclusive to Vyomo), and in the last five months we have delivered 50,000 services,” says Khare.

“We see ourselves operational in 15 cities, delivering 10,000 services a day in the next 12 to 18 months.” To support these ambitious plans, Vyomo says it will close a Series A round of funding in the next few weeks.

Being an aggregator (as opposed to having your own staff ) allows you to scale your business faster and lets consumers pick a service provider based on personal preferences, says Gaurav Maheshwari, an IITKharagpur alum who set up GetLook in June 2015.

Since then, the company has added some 200 people to its platform and fulfills 2,000 orders a month.

While home salon services have been delivered for at least the last five or six years now, Maheshwari says quality (of providers and products) has dogged the nascent industry.

GetLook’s beauticians, he claims, will carry a branded kit, use the products specified in a services (and not undercut a consumer with local/ cheaper alternatives), to try to stand out in a cutthroat industry.

In six months, GetLook has expanded its services to two cities and will add another three cities to its roster (where pilots are underway).

With plans to close its first round of VC funding in the next month, the startup may have the required fuel to power its ambitious plans.

As consumers vote with their feet, Maheshwari says the first signs of a shakeout are already imminent.

“There will be consolidation in this space in the next six months as investors begin to back top players and other companies (either large traditional ecommerce companies or newer hyperlocal ventures on an expansion spree) look to enter the beauty services market,” says Maheshwari.

A Buoyant Outlook

The husband-wife duo of Akshay and Garima Jain, founders of home salon business Belita, perhaps the oldest of the ventures in this space (it was founded in September 2011), deny their business will be first to fall.

For the past couple of years, the company’s been scouting for its first round of venture funding and has thus far raised only a small amount from angel investors to keep its business going.

Akshay Jain hotly denies the business is in trouble, instead claiming Belita recently pivoted from an offline home services provider to a controlled online market place.

In the process, Belita has spent the last few months refining its services delivery and by March 2017 the company wants to be in two cities.

“We are not just a Yellow Pages like service for the beauty industry...we want to control quality on our platform,” says Jain.

Belita, he adds, has 100 service providers fulfilling 130 bookings or 450 services daily and business has tripled in the last four months.

The company is adding 25-30 service providers a month and its average ticket size is Rs 1,200 and climbing.

Company executives agree that these new beauty ventures won’t take over the industry completely.

While some services can be delivered more comfortably or conveniently at home or at work, there are those which require customer to turn up at a salon.

“These platforms are redefining the industry, but it is too early yet to foretell the demise of the old guard,” says Sanghvi of MyGlamm.

“A divorce could reshape the global wealth ranking. If the couple split their fortune equally, it could leave wife MacKenzie with $69 billion, making her world’s richest woman. It could also make Microsoft's Bill Gates the planet’s richest person once again,” reported Bloomberg. Amazon founder Bezos was dating Lauren Sanchez, a 49-year-old ex-news anchor.